Pop and Jazz in Review
By PETER WATROUS
Published: February 13, 1992
Joe Morris Knitting Factory
The guitarist Joe Morris and his trio whipped through a tight little set at the Knitting Factory on Sunday night. Mr. Morris, who lives in Boston, rarely comes to New York, but when he does he comes prepared; his show was precisely arranged and organized and a bit hyperactive, with riffs and solos falling all over themselves to be heard.
But in an odd way, Mr. Morris has taken care to keep his rhythm section clean and orderly, having it spew out long, complicated riffs that often use off-balance time signatures. Mr. Morris, playing with a dirty, buzzing tone, clanged away at nicely angular melodies, but where the rhythm section was taut, Mr. Morris, who borrows some of his ideas from the guitarist James (Blood) Ulmer, caught Mr. Ulmer's openness and slackness. This bordered on false advertising, implying a certain improvisatory coarseness that wasn't really there.
The precision and laxity muted each other. Where the music drew on rock for some of its power, brittle and aggressive and loud, it also drew on jazz for some of its esthetic framework. And Mr. Morris, allowing improvisation to flow within the tight boundaries of the pieces, defused the technocratic implications of the progressive rock he occasionally veered toward. At their best, the compositions let Mr. Morris chug away through a solo, run across a riff that the whole band would investigate for a minute or two, then launch him into another improvisation. There was a sense of surprise.